A class of his own March 16, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, older son.Tags: college, older son
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We’ve started making a list of potential colleges for the older son. It was fairly easy to do because he had some set criteria: location, size of school, religious affiliation, etc. Based on this, we narrowed it down to 17 choices…initially. Since then, he crossed off one, added two others, and is unsure about another because, even though it’s big, he still wants to check it out. We’re waiting for viewbooks to come in the mail. Once he’s narrowed down the list a bit further, we’ll do some campus visits to a few in April.
In the college guide we used, there was a statistic stating, for each school, how many people attending are from the top 10% of their high school class. At first, I just sort of took it as a measure of selectivity of school. However, we started discussing this.
I came from a high school class of around 200, so the metric has some meaning there. However, Mike’s high school class had twelve people. That means that he and 1/5 of another person (approximately) constituted the top 10% of his high school class.
And then there’s the older son: he’s the whole class as he’s homeschooled. He’s therefore in the top and bottom 10%.
Coming from that perspective, this metric is about as useful as grades. I have no idea how I plan to do some sort of transcript and am considering just telling him to report his GED scores. I could give him grades for the classes he’s done based on his CLEP exams. Honestly, though, that would be unfair to him. He completed a year of college-level US history as a freshman in high school, but he got an average score on the exam. Do I give him a C? Doesn’t it matter that he was doing work typically reserved for someone four years older than him? It’s so subjective.
Another issue I have is that colleges typically request you have so many years of different types of classes. I’ll admit that while I was pretty structured with his math, I’ve found that the easiest way for him to learn everything else was just to let him follow his natural reading instinct, although I would occasionally hand him a book and say, “Read this.” It doesn’t seem relevant, to me at least, whether he spent four years chugging through textbooks if he can easily pass a college-level course in the same area.
As you can tell, he’s going to have a lot of fun filling out college applications. I hope he’s in a very creative mood when he starts.
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[...] quickly came to the realization, after coming up with a list of potential colleges for the older boy, that we should try to visit some campuses now. I teach in the fall and taking time off during [...]